Stay
by AdelineDalloway
Summary: Post-JE. On his first trip back to Earth, the Doctor is shocked to find that Donna has fought her way back to him. She has something to say - something she waited much too long for - and she's running out of time. 10/Donna - rating is subject to change.
1. Chapter 1

[Not mine, as per usual - everything belongs to the BBC. Rating is subject to change. All reviews will be cherished immensely.]

"Stay"

Part One

For a nine-hundred year old, the Doctor's memory truly was fantastic. Most days he was quite prideful of it. He could recall an entire galaxy's history in an instant, pulling nearly impossible faces and names and figures from seemingly endless stores of information. Most of the time this served him quite well; he could find customs that interested him, planets that needed him, and all the clever words he needed to save himself in the nick of time. Tonight, though, he loathed that impenetrable memory.

Donna Noble.

_The woman is everywhere,_ he thought as he avoided yet another world that brought his former companion to mind. Those oceans? Far too blue for his liking. Donna would have spent all eternity there, drinking colorful drinks by the purple crystal beaches and reading trashy romance novels. Knowing that, seeing the image so clearly in his mind, made him ache with misery. Abducens-5? No, Donna would never forgive him for going there and shopping without her. Besides, everyone on that planet is ginger and he knew he wouldn't have been able to stay there for long without missing her fiercely. Almost every trip went like this… it had been a month without her, one long month, and not for a single moment had it gotten any easier.

Now, sadly, he was traveling back to the one planet that reminded him of his loss the most – Earth. Martha was marrying and he had been threatened with bodily harm if he didn't attend. He was delighted for Martha, of course. When he'd debated accepting her invitation it wasn't because of her or her affianced – it was because he'd be a little less than a long walk away from Donna. He felt bad that his feelings for other people always seemed to affect the proud Martha Jones more than anyone else but much to her credit, she hadn't seemed to let it faze her at all. Not since she'd deemed it necessary to stop traveling with him, anyway. All for the best, he supposed. Martha was a great girl.

"Maybe that's your problem, then," a voice chimes in out of nowhere. "She's just a girl, isn't she? They both were, her and Rose."

He whipped around in utter shock, losing his footing and falling over as the TARDIS found her footing on Earth's solid and unforgiving ground. His shin gave a sharp wince as it hit a lever on the way down. His pant leg tore and skin broke but he hadn't noticed. All he noticed was the brusque voice still echoing off the walls.

Had he really heard that?

The TARDIS whirred happily around him, seemingly unaware of her pilot's psychological upset, before letting out a series of chirps he'd never heard before. He jumped up, huffing as he examined her controls. What in all the worlds had happened to his TARDIS? There wasn't a sound in her that he hadn't heard hundreds of times before – the fact that she was making all new ones disturbed him more than he wanted to admit. Something was wrong. Something was definitely, definitely wrong.

"Oi! That's her doorbell, you dunce. Not a malfunction."

He jerked his head around, shocked to see another person on the bridge with him. Not just _any_ other person – but _this_ particular person.

His jaw dropped.

"Donna?!"


	2. Chapter 2

[Perhaps one more chapter left after this one. Donna has some serious talking yet to do.]

"Stay"

Part Two

It was almost too eerie, really, the shock of finding Donna on the TARDIS once again. Her hands on her hips, her hair spread out on the shoulders of the gray sweater he last saw her wearing. It was as if no time had passed at all which, while poignant, is also frightening enough that he can't force his hearts out of his throat.

"D-Donna, I … How can? … Are you in any pain?" he stammered, painfully mindful of the consequences now that she'd remembered him. He hadn't been exaggerating with Wilfred and Sylvia – Donna would have burned up in seconds had she stumbled upon their memories together.

"Not a bit," she assures him. "Then again, not sure I could even process nociceptive stimuli in my present form anyhow, so we'll stick with my pervious answer."

Nociceptive stimuli?

"Well, I shouldn't say 'my present form' because I'm not actually presently here, nor am I fully formed," she rambled for a moment. "But you know, the semantics aren't really the matter here if you ask me."

He saddened as she spoke because after listening to her he knew that his Donna was still gone. This, this _person_ or whatever it was may have looked like Donna but that was as far as the comparison went. She was still talking when he pulled out of his thoughts, and he felt no guilt at all when he interrupted her ranting.

"You're not Donna," the Doctor said with some finality. "A good imitation, certainly, but still leagues away from the real thing." She didn't dispute the fact, not that he'd really expected her to. "So… that leaves one question, really: Who are you?"

"Clever, not that I'm surprised," the Donna duplicate observed, crossing her arms over her ample chest and walking towards him. "Though I suppose she should be insulted that you don't think she can use big words. That was my mistake, obviously."

He shrugged. "Nah. She'd be the first to admit it." He eyed the duplicate warily, refusing to back down when she stops just in front of him. "You haven't answered my question."

"No, I haven't," she said with a sigh. "I'm doing my level best to decide if I should be angry you tried to do me in."

His brow furrowed at the colloquial term. "Do you in? I don't even know who – or _what_, for that matter – you are. How could I have tried to kill you?"

"Not sure you thought of it that way at the time," she replies. "I'm never supposed to happen, you see. You blanked me out to save Donna."

Blanked out?

"As in…?"

"As in, erased. Gone. Poof!" she replied and dread built up in his throat. "All to save her. You needed her so, so badly to be alive that you were willing to sacrifice an entirely new species – the first of a kind."

Realization dawned and his eyes widened in shock.

"The metacrisis."

She nodded. "You're looking at her. I am the DoctorDonna, live and not-so-in-the-flesh. Incorporeal, you see."

He reached out and sure enough, his hand passed effortlessly through her arm. She didn't so much as flinch, but he did. While she may have looked solid enough, there was no physical substance to be found. It was unnerving to be talking to a shadow of Donna's essence.

"I don't believe in ghosts," the Doctor states suddenly, making the metacrisis laugh.

"Nor me. I'm not a ghost. You can't deny the parallels, though. Old friend come back after you never expected to see her again, appears out of nowhere, no tangible body… I can appreciate the similarities." After searching his face and seeing the question written plainly across it, she takes pity on him and adds, "She's alive and well, I promise."

"Yeah?" he asks, immensely relived. "So what are you, then?"

"Other than brilliant and gorgeous, you mean?"

"Yes."

"I'm an astral projection," she says and notes the disbelief on his face. "No, I understand. I wouldn't have believed me either but that's the truth. After you wiped her memory, I didn't really disappear – I just sort of… hid."

"You hid?" he repeats incredulously. "Just like that?"

"I suppose so, yeah," she shrugs. "Survival instincts go a lot further than just the humanoid races, you know. The part of her mind that combined the two of you – resulting in _me_, obviously – knew what was happening before she was willing to admit it to herself. Since I knew what you were going to have to do to save her, I decided to just take off. I shoved myself into a dark corner of her amygdala and waited until she'd gone about her life as normal. When she was comfortable, ignoring the massive holes in her memory, I started thinking about getting out and stretching my legs a bit."

"Is that what you're doing now?" he asks warily. "Stretching your legs?"

"Something to that effect," she replies and exhales loudly. "I just… stopped concentrating on hiding. You would think that it would be the opposite, intense concentration, but when I just let go and let myself _feel… _well, I ended up here. Every part of me knows that this is where I belong."

"Oh, Donna." He blinked and the pained expression on his face says that he's noticed his error. "No, I mean…"

"No, it's fine. You can call me Donna. I am her, after all."

"Are you?"

"In every way that matters, yeah. We feel the same things, dream the same things… the only real difference is that I've got all the memories she's not allowed to have anymore."

"I'm sorry," he says. He's surprised by how fervently he means it.

"No, don't be," she says, shaking her head. "It's how it has to be."

"Are you happy, at least?" the Doctor inquires, curiosity getting the better of him. "In this state, I mean."

"Yeah. For the most part, yeah. Things get a little boring now and again, but it's better than being dead I suppose."

"Fair enough." He shoves his hands in his pockets.

"The thing is this," she says exasperatedly, "I know I can't reintegrate myself with Donna's working memory. You were correct in your assertion that she would die if forced to contain all that energy. Even still, I am Donna. We're the same person, and I've lived with her burdens just as much as she's been forced to forget mine."

"How are you then, Donna?" he asks, trying to believe for the time being that they were actually speaking.

"Good. Things are good," she answers, taking in a deep breath and leaning her hip on the railing next to him. "Working now – just another temp job, but it's moderately entertaining. I'm even making friends."

"Friends? With that mouth of yours?" he asks incredulously, delighting as she elbows him in the ribs. "Shocking."

"Oh, I know. Practically saints, they are, to put up with me."

"Well, you'd almost have to be," he adds, winking playfully. She laughs and crosses her arms over her chest. "What else? What else have you done?"

"Got some highlights in my hair for a little while," she says off-handedly. "I was feeling whimsical and put some blonde in there. Two weeks later I hated it, and I went right back to ginger."

He laughs. "It's a riveting life you lead."

"You haven't any idea how exciting it is. I'm breathless sometimes."

"Tell me more."

"Don't you have somewhere to be?" she asks, a sad smile tilting the corners of her mouth. "Lord knows there's always someone depending on you somewhere."

"Not just yet," he says softly. "Stay with me a little while?"

She smiles. "Yeah. As long as I can."


	3. Chapter 3

"Stay"

Part Three

"I've taken up running, I'll have you know."

"No!"

"Yes," she assures him and he shakes his head. "Oh, I know. It's nearly unbelievable, it is. One night I just got up from the table, changed shoes, and took off out the door. My poor mother looked like I'd sprouted another head or something."

The Doctor smiles, imagining Sylvia's expression. "Oh, I just bet she did."

"So I took off out the door, and just started running. Came in about an hour later, just short of three miles gone," she recalls, shaking her head. "I just kept doing it, night after night. When people ask I have to make something up about getting fit or whatever, which is a nice little bonus. The truth is that I feel better when I'm running. Safer, I guess."

"Safer?" he asks. "Are you in any danger?"

"Oh, no, nothing like that," she denies quickly. "Just… there's something back there that's comforting in the running. I feel like I'm protected like that. I don't know, it must be all the running we did together. Trying to survive and all that."

"Motor memory runs deep," he observes, nodding.

"All memory does, I'm finding," she says sadly and he looks down to see tears gathering in her eyelashes. It feels like a kick in the chest to see his friend, the woman he loves, in such pain.

"Donna?" he questions, unfolding his arms and turning to face her. "Donna, what is it?"

"I just… oh, you'll laugh at me," she says and shakes her head, immediately bringing her hands up to wipe the salty drops away from her eyes.

"You know I won't do that."

She sighs wistfully. "I just miss you, that's all."

"I miss you, too," he says, his words heartfelt. It was true – he missed her desperately. It warmed him slightly to hear that he'd been so important to her, too.

"It's – it's more than just _missing _you," she says distractedly. "I don't know how to describe it. Like a phantom body part or something… like part of me is missing and I can't get it back no matter how many times I reach for it in the night."

She takes a step forward and starts to pace fretfully in front of him. "I just know, deep down inside me, that I'm supposed to be with you. She knows it too, Doctor. Every day when we get up and go to that job where we have a little desk with Gramps' picture in a frame and we stare a little too long at the skinny mail boy… we know. She can't put a name to it, but I can. It feels like the universe was just snatched away and we can never touch it ever again, no matter how often we dream about the stars and everything else that's out there.

"Nothing will ever be the same and yeah, sometimes I get downright angry thinking about it. Furious, even! Sometimes I want to have a good cry. Either way, it passes because what else can it do?" she asks, not actually expecting an answer. The Doctor remains quiet. "The next time it comes around I greet it like an old friend, knowing it's been exactly three days, eight hours, five minutes and eighteen seconds since last I'd felt so completely desolate."

He picked his head up and looked at her, studying her carefully. They certainly shared more traits now than they ever had before the metacrisis. It wounded the Doctor to see that his burden was now hers as well. Donna rambled, unfazed. He was no longer sure if she cared that he heard her. It seemed to be a relief just to say the words aloud.

"This new awareness of time and distance is just awful. Magnificent but awful," she says, summing the paradox up beautifully. "I am aware of every second I'm apart from you because every second of it aches. It is absolute _agony _knowing you're banished from the only place in the universe you'd ever truly belonged. Banished from the only _person _in the universe you'd ever truly loved."

His breath caught. Loved?

"That's right, you idiot spaceman," she says, very nearly reading his thoughts. "I loved you all that time, _needed _you desperately for every moment we were ever together, and I can only say that once I've lost my ability to touch you at all. How's _that _for irony!" She let out a sob into the air between them. It echoed around the Tardis and he had to close his eyes to brace himself against the sound. "God, if I'd known. If I'd even guessed that this would be what it all came to, I never would have agreed to your 'just mates' nonsense. I would have taken you right there against the door and let you worry about the rest later."

His eyebrow arched instantly, nearly reaching his hairline. When had this conversation shifted to… to _that_? Not that he minded the image that presented in his head. No, he didn't mind that at all.

"In the end, I feel like it's you that's making it impossible for me to let go and just… disappear," she says and his hearts suddenly ache, feeling like he's losing her all over again. "She knows you, she senses your loss and the fact that she never had you in the way she really wanted you. It's why she won't let me go either, I think. She knows I'm the key to getting back something that's been taken from her and in a way she's not wrong. In the end she never really got her closure. She got a lot of missing time and the dreadful ache of grief that she can't place."

"Is that why you're here, then?" the Doctor asks, trying not to sound as angry as he could feel himself becoming. "To placate her and then die? To torture me even more for failing to protect you in the first place?"

She scoffs. "You can't be serious."

"Can't I?"

"No, because now I'm doing the same thing you did to save me the first time!" she yells angrily. "I am getting myself what I need, what _she _needs, to finally give up searching. She's looking for you, Doctor, even if she doesn't know that's what she's looking for. How long will it be before she forces the memories back?"

"That shouldn't-"

"What? Be a problem?" she interjects incredulously. "Okay, so you've told Gramps and my mother about it. Did you get the memo to everyone else on the planet? Because there's bound to a come a time when someone says the wrong thing at the wrong moment and then it's all over. At that point she can either blow them off or really give it some thought to see if it fits with what she feels has gone missing from her head. Which would you prefer to happen?"

He does nothing but stare her down. "You know the answer to that."

"Course I do."

"Well then?" he asks, "What would you have me do?"

She smiles sadly. "I want you to let me tell you I love you, and I want you to say you love me."

"What?"

"That's it," she murmurs. "Just let me have my goodbye, a real proper goodbye, and then I'll go. Closure, Doctor. It's all I'd ever really wanted."

"You've never needed me to tell you that, Donna," he says assuredly. "You had to have known that I loved you from the very first insult you'd ever hurled my way. You had to have seen the longing in my eyes every time I looked at you. "

"No," she sniffled. "I never did."

"Oh, what I wouldn't have given for you," he mutters passionately, his voice rough. He lifts his hand, moving to touch her but painfully aware of the fact that he can't. "I would have given everything I'd ever had for one brush of that skin against my own. If there was a single thing I wish you had never doubted, it should have been my absolute and undying love of you, Donna Noble."

Without thinking he reached up to wipe the tears from her eyes, admiring the sparkling blue, but before he could remind himself of her corporeal limitations his hand met cool, wet skin. Donna looked up, obviously shocked, and met his eyes.

"How…?"

"The Tardis," he answers easily. "It looks like you have some help."

She laughs and it takes all of a second for her to stand up on the very tips of her toes and plant her mouth against his. He wastes not a single second on the concept of surprise. Wrapping his arms around her and pulling her body tightly against his, he inherently matches her rhythm and kisses her as though he had been doing so for millennia. Why hadn't they done this every second of every day they'd ever shared? Why had he let thing, such inconsequential things, come in between them?

"Doctor," she whispers suddenly, pulling away. "Doctor, I have to go now."

"What?" he gasps. "Why?"

"Because my energy has just about used itself up," she replies and as soon as she utters the words he can see the truth of them. Donna has lost a little of her usually vibrant color – her entire image is graying, as though she's quietly fading away. "The Tardis can only help so much, poor girl. She's probably sick to death of helping me by now."

"Don't be ridiculous," he scolds but it's of no use – their time together is ending, and quickly.

"I love you, m'kay?" she reminds him gently, rubbing his shoulders. He can barely feel the touch at all. "Don't forget that."

He puts his chin up. "Wouldn't dare."

"Good man," she says and places another kiss gently at the corner of his mouth. "Bye, then. Be safe or I'll murder you."

The Doctor laughs without a trace of humor. "I love you, Ms. Noble. Don't forget that."

She smiles, just a gentle upturn of her lips, and then she's gone. He doesn't even have the chance to try and convince her to stay. She'd vanished in front of him, like he'd imagined the entire thing. Only the Tardis' low murmur of sadness convinces him of her sudden appearance and their exchange. The Doctor turns around, pinches the bride of his nose above his glasses, and leans against the railing. Every aching breath convinces him of a single thing:

He would never be able to give her up.

* * *

_{End}_

_[ Author's Note ]_

_Be on the lookout for my upcoming multi-chapter fic - "Sooner or Later", inspired by the remarkable Basmathgirl. _

_"Hunted by the Family of Blood, the Doctor has to strand himself in 1913 Earth without the benefit of a companion. There, John Smith becomes attached to Donna Noble, a fiery woman with a delightful sense of humor and more secrets than she's willing to share. As his terrifying dreams begin to hint at the existence of another man, he'll be forced to confront darker matters than just the disappearances of a few townspeople. When the Family catches up with him, John will have no choice but to decide his true identity - man or Time Lord - and who will be left behind.]_


End file.
